The peace process has
collapsed – and taken down with it a large part of the Israeli peace
camp.

Transient circumstances, such
as personal or party-political matters, failures of leadership,
political self-interest, domestic and global political developments
– all these are like foam over the waves. Important as they may be,
they cannot adequately explain the total collapse.

The true explanation can only
be found beneath the surface, at the roots of the historical
conflict between the two nations.

The Madrid-Oslo process failed
because the two sides were seeking to realize conflicting goals.

The goals of each of the two
sides emanated from their basic national interests. They were shaped
by their historical narratives, by their disparate views of the
conflict over the last 120 years. The Israeli national historical
version and the Palestinian national historical version are entirely
contradictory, on the whole and in every single detail.

The negotiators and the
decision-makers on the Israeli side acted in complete oblivion of
the Palestinian national narrative. Even when they had sincere
good-will to come to a solution, their efforts were doomed to fail
as they could not understand the national desires, traumas, fears
and hopes of the Palestinian people. While there is no symmetry
between the two sides, the Palestinian attitude was similar.

Resolution of such a long
historical conflict is possible only if each side is capable of
understanding the other’s spiritual-national world and willing to
approach him as an equal. An insensitive, condescending and
overbearing attitude precludes any possibility of an agreed
solution.

The Barak Government, which
had inspired so much hope, was afflicted with all these attitudes,
hence, the enormous gap between its initial promise and the
disastrous results.

A significant part of the old
peace camp (also called the "Zionist Left" or the "Sane
Constituency") is similarly afflicted and therefore collapsed along
with the government it supported.

Therefore, the primary role of
a new Israeli peace camp is to get rid of the false myths and the
one-sided view of the conflict. This does not mean that the Israeli
narrative should automatically be rejected and the Palestinian
narrative unquestionably accepted. But it does require open-minded
listening and understanding of the other position in the historical
conflict, in order to bridge the two national narratives.

Any other way will lead to an
unending continuation of the conflict, with periods of ostensible
tranquility and conciliation frequently interrupted by eruptions of
violent hostile actions between the two nations and between Israel
and the Arab world. Considering the pace of development of weapons
of mass destruction, further rounds of hostility could lead to the
destruction of all sides to the conflict.

The Root of the Conflict

The Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is the continuation of the historical clash between the
Zionist Movement and the Palestinian Arab people, a clash that began
at the end of the 19th century and has yet to end.

The Zionist Movement was,
essentially, a Jewish reaction to the emergence of the national
movements in Europe, all of which were hostile to Jews. Having been
rejected by the European nations, some of the Jews decided to
establish themselves as a separate nation and, following the new
European model, to set up their own national State where they could
be masters of their own fate. The principle of separation, which
formed the basis of the Zionist idea, had far-reaching consequences
later on. The basic Zionist tenet, that a minority cannot exist in a
national-homogenous state according to the European model, let later
to the practical exclusion of the national minority in the Zionist
state that came into being after 50 years.

Traditional and religious
motives drew the Zionist Movement to Palestine (Eretz Israel in
Hebrew) and the decision was made to establish the Jewish State in
this land. The maxim was "a land without a people for a people
without a land". This maxim was not only created out of ignorance,
but also out of the general arrogance towards non-European peoples
that prevailed in Europe at that time.

Palestine was not empty – not
at the end of the 19th century nor at any other period.
At that time, there were half a million people living in Palestine,
90% of them Arabs. This population objected, of course, to the
incursion of another nation into their land.

The Arab National Movement
emerged almost simultaneously with the Zionist Movement, initially
to fight the Ottoman Empire and later to fight the colonial regimes
created upon its destruction at the end of World War I. A separate
Arab-Palestinian national movement developed in the country after
the British created a separate State called "Palestine", and in
course of the struggle against the Zionist infiltration.

Since the end of World War I,
there has been an ongoing struggle between two nationalist
movements, the Jewish-Zionist and the Palestinian-Arab, both of
which aspired to accomplish their goals – which entirely negate each
other - within the same territory. This situation remains unchanged
to this day.

As Jewish persecution in
Europe intensified, and as the countries of the world closed their
gates to the Jews attempting to flee the inferno, so the Zionist
Movement gained strength. The Holocaust, which took the lives of six
million Jews, gave moral and political power to the Zionist claim
that led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

The Palestinian People,
witnessing the growth of the Jewish population in their land, could
not comprehend why they were required to pay the price for crimes
committed against the Jews by Europeans. They violently objected to
further Jewish immigration and to the acquisition of lands by the
Jews.

The complete oblivion of each
of the two peoples to the national existence of the other inevitably
led to false and distorted perceptions that took root deep in the
collective consciousness of both. These perceptions affect their
attitude towards each other to this day.

The Arabs believed that the
Jews had been implanted in the country by Western Imperialism, in
order to subjugate the Arab world and take control of its treasures.
This conviction was strengthened by the fact that the Zionist
movement, from the outset, strove for an alliance with at least one
Western power (Germany, Great Britain, France, the U.S.A.) to
overcome the Arab resistance. The results were a practical
cooperation and a community of interests between the Zionist
enterprise and imperialist and colonialist forces, directed against
the Arab national movement.

The Jews, on the other hand,
were convinced that the Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise –
intended to save the Jews from the flames of Europe – was the
consequence of the murderous nature of the Arabs and of Islam. In
their eyes, Arab fighters were "gangs", and the uprisings of the
time were called "riots".

(Actually, in the 1920’s, the
most extreme Zionist leader, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, was almost alone to
recognize that the Arab resistance to the Zionist settlement was an
inevitable, natural and from this point of view just reaction of a
"native" people defending their country against foreign invaders.
Jabotinsky also recognized the fact that the Arabs in the country
were a separate national entity and derided attempts made to bribe
the leaders of other Arab countries to put an end to the Palestinian
Arab resistance. However, Jabotinsky’s conclusion was to erect a
"wall of steel" against the Arabs and to crush their resistance by
force.)

This total contradiction in
the perception of the facts affects every aspect of the conflict.
For example, the Jews interpreted their struggle for "Jewish Labor"
as a progressive social effort to transform a nation of merchants
and speculators into one of workers and farmers. The Arabs, on the
other hand, saw it as a criminal attempt by the Zionists to
dispossess them, to evict them from the labor market and to create,
on their land, an Arab-free, separatist Jewish economy.

The Zionists were proud of
their "Redemption of the Land". They had purchased it for full value
with money collected from Jews around the world. "Olim" (new
immigrants, literally pilgrims) who had been intellectuals and
merchants in their former life, now earned their living with the
sweat of their brow. They believed that they had achieved all this
by peaceful means and without dispossessing a single Arab. For the
Arabs this was a cruel narrative of dispossession and expulsion: The
Jews acquired lands from rich absentee Arab landowners and then
forcibly evicted the fellahin who had, for generations, been living
on and earning their living from these lands. To help them in this
effort, the Zionists engaged the Turkish and, later, the British
police. The Arabs looked on, despairingly, as their land was taken
from them.

Against the Zionist claim of
having successfully "turned the desert into a garden", the Arabs
cited the testimonies of European travelers who spoke of a Palestine
that, for several centuries, had described Palestine as a populated
and flourishing land, the equal of any of its regional neighbors.

Independence and Disaster

The contrast between the two
national versions peaked in the war of 1948, a war called "the War
of Independence" or even "the War of Liberation" by the Jews, and
"El Naqba", the disaster, by the Arabs.

As the conflict intensified in
the region, and with the resounding impact of the Holocaust, the
United Nations decided to divide the country into two States, Jewish
and Arab. Jerusalem and its environs were supposed to remain a
separate unit, under international jurisdiction. The Jews were
allotted 55% of the land including the unpopulated Negev.

The Zionist Movement accepted
the partition plan, convinced that the crucial issue was to
establish a firm foundation for Jewish sovereignty. In closed
meetings, David Ben-Gurion never concealed his intention to expand,
at the first opportunity, the territory given to the Jews. That is
why Israel’s Declaration of Independence did not define the
country’s borders and the country has remained without definite
borders to this day.

The Arab world did not accept
the partition plan and regarded it a vile attempt of the United
Nations, which essentially was at the time a club of Western and
Communist nations, to divide a country that did not belong to it.
Handing over most of the country to the Jewish minority, which
represented a mere third of the population, made it all the more
unforgivable in their eyes.

The war initiated by the Arabs
after the partition plan was, inescapably, an "ethnic" war; a kind
of war in which each side seeks to conquer as much land as possible
and evict the population of the other side. Such a campaign (which
later came to be called "ethnic cleansing") always involves
expulsion and atrocities.

The war of 1948 was a direct
extension of the Zionist-Arab conflict in which each side sought to
fulfill its aims. The Jews wanted to establish a homogenous,
national State that would be as large as possible. The Arabs wanted
to eradicate the Zionist Jewish entity that had been established in
Palestine.

Both sides practiced ethnic
cleansing as an integral part of the fighting. There were not many
Arabs remaining in territories captured by the Jews and no Jews
remained in territories captured by the Arabs. However, as the
territories captured by the Jews were by far larger than those
captured by the Arabs, the result was unbalanced. (The ideas of
"population exchange" and "transfer" were raised in Zionist
organizations as early as in the 1930’s. Effectively this meant the
expulsion of the Arab population from the country. On the other
side, many among the Arabs believed that the Zionists should go back
to wherever they came from.)

The myth of "the few against
the many" was cultivated by the Jews to describe the stand of the
Jewish community of 650,000 against the entire Arab world of over a
hundred million. The Jewish community lost 1% of its people in the
war. The Arabs painted a completely different picture: A fragmented
Arab population with no national leadership to speak of, with no
unified command over its meager forces, with poor, few and mostly
obsolete weapons, confronting an extremely well organized Jewish
community that was highly trained in the use of its weapons. The
neighboring Arab countries betrayed the Palestinians and, when they
finally did send their armies, they primarily operated in
competition with each other, with no coordination and no common
plan. From the social and military point of view, the fighting
capabilities of the Israeli side were far superior to those of the
Arab states, which had hardly emerged from the colonial era.

According to the United
Nations plan, the Jewish State was supposed to include an Arab
population amounting to about 40%. During the war the Jewish State
expanded its borders and ended up with 78% of the area of the land.
This area was nearly devoid of Arabs. The Arab populations of
Nazareth and a few villages in the Galilee remained almost
incidentally; the villages in the Triangle had been given to Israel
as part of a deal by King Abdullah and, therefore, could not be
evacuated.

In the war a total of 750,000
Palestinians were uprooted. Some of them fled out of fear of the
battle, as civilian populations do in every war. Some were driven
away by acts of terror such as the Dir-Yassin Massacre. Others were
systematically evicted in the course of the ethnic cleansing.

No less important than the
expulsion is the fact that the refugees were not allowed to return
to their homes when the battles were over, as is the practice after
a conventional war. Quite to the contrary, the new Israel saw the
removal of the Arabs very much as a blessing and proceeded to
totally demolish 450 Arab villages. New Jewish villages were built
on the ruins, and new Hebrew names were given to them. The abandoned
houses in the cities were repopulated with new immigrants.

"A Jewish State"

The signing of the cease-fire
agreements at the end of the war of 1948 did not bring an end to the
historical conflict. That was, in fact, raised to new and more
intensive levels.

The new State of Israel
dedicated its early years to the consolidation of its homogenous
national character as a "Jewish State". Large sections of land were
expropriated from the "absentees" (the refugees), from those
officially designed as "present absentees" (Arabs who physically
remained in Israel but were not allowed to become citizens) and even
from the Arab citizens of Israel, most of whose lands were taken
over. On these lands a dense network of Jewish communities was
created. Jewish "Immigrants" were invited and even coaxed to come in
masses. This great effort fortified the State’s power several times
over in but a few years.

At the same time the State
vigorously conducted a policy to obliterate the Palestinian entity
as a national entity. With Israeli help, the Trans-Jordan monarch,
Abdullah, took control over the West Bank and since then there is,
in effect, an Israeli military guarantee for the existence of the
Kingdom of Jordan.

The main rationale of the
treaty between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom, which has been in
effect for three generations, was to prevent the establishment of an
independent Arab-Palestinian State, which was considered – then and
now – as an obstacle to the realization of the Zionist objective.

A historical change occurred
at the end of the 1950’s on the Palestinian side when Yasser Arafat
and his associates founded the Fatah Movement designed to free the
Palestinian liberation movement from the custody of the Arab
governments. It was no accident that this movement emerged after the
failure of the great Pan-Arab concept whose most renowned
representative was Gamal Abd-el-Nasser. Up to this point many
Palestinians had hoped to be absorbed into a united All-Arab Nation.
When this hope faded, the separate National Palestinian identity
re-emerged.

The Palestinian Liberation
Organization (PLO) was created by Gamal Abd-el-Nasser to prevent
autonomous Palestinian action that might involve him in an undesired
war with Israel. The organization was intended to impose Egyptian
authority over the Palestinians. However, after the Arab defeat in
the June 1967 war, Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, took control over
the PLO and has been the sole representative of the Palestinian
people ever since.

"The Six Day War"

The June 1967 war is seen in a
very different light by the two sides, as has every incident in the
last 120 years. According to the Israeli myth, this was a desperate
war of defense, which miraculously placed a lot of land in Israel’s
hands. According to the Palestinian myth, the leaders of Egypt,
Syria and Jordan fell into a trap set by Israel in order to capture
whatever was left of Palestine.

Many Israelis believe that
"the Six Day War" was the root of all evil and it was only then that
the peace-loving and progressive Israel turned into a conqueror and
an occupier. This conviction allows them to maintain the absolute
purity of Zionism and the State of Israel up to that point in
history and preserve their old myths. There is no truth to this
legend.

The war of 1967 was yet
another phase of the old struggle between the two national
movements. It did not change the essence; it only changed the
circumstances. The essential objectives of the Zionist Movement – a
Jewish State, expansion, and settlement – were making great strides.
The particular circumstances made extensive ethnic cleansing
impossible in this war, but several hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians were nevertheless expelled.

Israel was allotted 55% of the
land (Palestine) by the 1947 partition plan, an additional 23% were
captured in the 1948 war and now the remaining 22%, across the
"Green Line" (the pre-1967 armistice line), were also captured. In
1967 Israel inadvertently united the Palestinian people (including
some of the refugees) under its rule.

As soon as the war ended, the
Settlement Movement began. Almost every political faction in the
country participated in this movement – from the
messianic-nationalistic "Gush Emunim" to the "leftist" United
Kibbutz Movement. The first settlers received broad support from
most politicians, left and right, from Yigal Alon (the Jewish
settlement in Hebron) to Shimon Peres (the Kdumim settlement).

The fact that all governments
of Israel cultivated and advanced the settlements, albeit to
differing extents, proves that the settlement aspiration was
restricted to no specific ideological camp and extended to the
entire Zionist Movement. The impression that has been created of a
small minority driving the Settlement Movement is illusionary. Only
a consolidated effort on the part of all Government Agencies since
1967 and till today could have produced the legislative, the
strategic and the budgetary infrastructure required for such a
long-lasting and expensive endeavor.

The legislative infrastructure
incorporates the misleading assumption that the Occupation Authority
is the owner of "government-owned lands", although these are the
essential land reserves of the Palestinian population. It is
self-evident that the Settlement Movement contravenes International
Law.

The dispute between the
proponents of the "Greater Israel" and those of "Territorial
Compromise" is essentially a dispute about the way to achieve the
basic Zionist aspiration: a homogenous Jewish State in as large a
territory as possible. The proponents of "compromise" emphasize the
demographic issue and want to prevent the inclusion of the
Palestinian population in the State. The "Greater Israel" adherents
place the emphasis on the geographic issue and believe (privately or
publicly) that it is possible to expel the non-Jewish population
from the country (code name: "Transfer").

The General Staff of the
Israeli army played an important role in the planning and building
of the Settlements. It created the map of the settlements
(identified with Ariel Sharon): blocs of settlements and bypass
roads, lateral and longitudinal, so that the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip are chopped up into pieces and the Palestinians are imprisoned
in isolated enclaves, each of which is surrounded by settlements and
the occupation forces.

The Palestinians employed
several methods of resistance, mainly raids across the Jordanian and
Lebanese borders and attacks inside Israel and everywhere in the
world. These acts are called "terrorist" by the Israelis while the
Palestinians see them as the legitimate resistance of an occupied
nation. The PLO leadership, headed by Yasser Arafat, had long been
considered a terrorist leadership by the Israelis but has gradually
came to be internationally recognized as the "sole legitimate
representative" of the Palestinian people.

When the Palestinians realized
that these actions do not put an end to the settlement momentum,
which gradually pulled the land from under their feet, at the end of
1987 they launched the Intifadah – a grassroots uprising of all
sectors of the population. In this Intifidah, 1500 Palestinians were
killed, among them hundreds of children, several times over the
number of Israeli losses.

The Peace Process

The October 1973 war, which
commenced with the surprise victory of the Egyptian and Syrian
forces and culminated with their defeat, convinced Yasser Arafat and
his close associates that there is no military way to achieve the
national Palestinian objectives. He decided to embark upon a
political path to reach agreement with Israel and to allow, at
least, a partial achievement of the national goals through
negotiation.

To prepare the ground for
this, Arafat created contact for the first time with Israeli
personalities who could make an impact on public opinion and on
government policy in Israel. His emissaries (Said Hamami and Issam
Sartawi) met with Israeli public figures, the peace pioneers who in
1975 established the "Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian
Peace".

These contacts as well as the
growing fatigue felt by the Israelis of the Intifadah, the Jordanian
withdrawal from the West Bank, changing international conditions
(the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the Gulf War) led to the Madrid
Conference and, later, to the Oslo Agreement.

The Oslo Agreement

The Oslo Agreement had
positive and negative qualities.

On the positive side, this
agreement brought Israel to its first official recognition of the
Palestinian People and its national leadership and brought the
National Palestinian Movement to its recognition of the existence of
Israel. In this respect the agreement (and the exchange of letters
that preceded it) were of paramount historical significance.

In effect, the agreement gave
the National Palestinian Movement a territorial base on Palestinian
land, the structure of a "state in the making" and armed forces –
facts that would play an important role in the ongoing Palestinian
struggle. For the Israelis, the agreement opened the gates to the
Arab world and put an end to Palestinian attacks – as long as the
agreement was effective.

The most substantive flaw in
the agreement was that both sides hoped to achieve entirely
different objectives. The Palestinians saw it as a temporary
agreement paving the way to the end of the occupation, the
establishment of a Palestinian State in all the occupied
territories. On the other hand, the respective Israeli governments
regarded it as a way to maintain the occupation in large sections of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the Palestinian
self-government filling the role of an auxiliary security agency
protecting Israel and the settlements.

Therefore, Oslo did not
represent the beginning of the process to end the conflict but,
rather, another new phase of the conflict.

Because the expectations of
both sides were so divergent and each remained entirely bound to its
own national "narrative", every section of the agreement was
interpreted differently. Ultimately, many parts of the agreement
were not carried out, mainly by Israel (the third withdrawal, the
four safe passages, and others).

Throughout the period of the
"Oslo Process" Israel continued its vigorous expansion of the
settlements, primarily by creating new ones under various guises,
expanding existing ones, building an elaborate network of "bypass"
roads, expropriating land, demolishing houses and uprooting
plantations etc. The Palestinians, on their part, used the time to
build their strength, both within the framework of the agreement and
without it. In fact, the historical confrontation continued unabated
under the guise of negotiations and the "Peace Process", which
became a proxy for actual peace.

In contradistinction to his
image, which became more pronounced after his assassination, Yitzhak
Rabin kept the conflict alive "in the field", while simultaneously
managing the political process to achieve peace, on Israeli terms.
As he was a disciple of the Zionist "narrative" and accepted its
mythology, he suffered from cognitive dissonance when his hopes for
peace clashed with his conceptual world. It appears that he began to
internalize some parts of the Palestinian historical narrative only
at the very end of his life.

The case of Shimon Peres is
much more severe. He created for himself an international image of a
peacemaker and even designed his language to reflect this image
("the New Middle East") while remaining essentially a traditional
Zionist hawk. This became clear in the short and violent period that
he served as Prime Minister after the assassination of Rabin and,
again, in his current acceptance of the role of spokesman and
apologist for Sharon.

The clearest expression of the
Israeli dilemma was provided by Ehud Barak who came to power
completely convinced of his ability to cut the Gordian knot of the
historical conflict in one dramatic stroke, in the fashion of
Alexander the Great. Barak approached the issue in total ignorance
of the Palestinian narrative and with disrespect to its importance.
He presented his proposals as ultimatums and was appalled and
enraged by their rejection.

In the eyes of himself and the
Israeli side at large, Barak "turned every stone" and made the
Palestinians "more generous offers than any previous Prime
Minister". In exchange, he wanted the Palestinians to sign off on
"an end to the conflict". The Palestinians considered this a
preposterous pretension since Barak was effectively asking them to
relinquish their basic national aspiration, such as the Right of
Return and sovereignty in East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.
Moreover, while Barak presented the claims for the annexation of
territories as matter of negligible percentages ("Settlement
Blocs"), according to Palestinian calculations this amounted to an
actual annexation of 20% of the land beyond the Green Line.

In the Palestinian view, they
had already made the decisive compromise by agreeing to establish
their State within the Green Line, in merely 22% of their historical
homeland. Therefore, they could only accept minor border changes in
the context of territorial swaps. The traditional Israeli position
is that the achievements of the war of 1948 are established facts
that cannot be disputed and the compromise required must focus on
the remaining 22%.

As with most terms and
concepts, the word "concession" has different meanings for both
sides. The Palestinians believe that they have already "conceded"
78% of their land when they agreed to accept 22% of it. The Israelis
believe that they are "conceding" when they agree to "give" the
Palestinians parts of those same 22% (the West Bank and the Gaza
Strip).

The Camp David Summit in the
summer of 2000, which was imposed on Arafat against his will, was
premature and brought things to a climax. Barak’s demands, presented
at the summit as Clinton’s, were that the Palestinians agree to end
the conflict by conceding the Right of Return and the Return itself;
to accept complicated arrangements for East Jerusalem and the Temple
Mount without achieving sovereignty over them; to agree to large
territorial annexations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and to
an Israeli military presence in other large areas and to Israeli
control over the borders separating the Palestinian State from the
rest of the world. No Palestinian leader would ever sign such an
agreement and thus the summit ended in deadlock and the termination
of the careers of Clinton and Barak.

The El Aqsa Intifadah

The breakdown of the summit,
the elimination of any hope for an agreement between the two sides
and the unconditional pro-Israeli stance of the Americans,
inevitably led to another round of violent confrontations, which
earned the title of the al-Aqsa Intifadah. For the Palestinians,
this is a justified national uprising against the protracted
occupation, which has no end in sight and allows continual and daily
pulling of their land from under their feet. For the Israelis, this
is an outburst of murderous terrorism. The performers of these acts
appear to the Palestinians as national heroes and to the Israelis as
merciless criminals who must be liquidated.

The official media in Israel
no longer mention settlers but speak of "residents" upon whom any
attack is a crime against civilians. The Palestinians consider the
settlers the forefront of a dangerous enemy force whose intention is
to dispossess them of their land and who must be defeated.

A great part of the Israeli
"Peace Camp" collapsed during the al-Akza Intifadah and it turns out
that many of its convictions had feet of clay. Especially after
Barak had "turned every stone" and made "more generous offers than
any previous Prime Minister, the Palestinian behavior was
incomprehensible to this part of the "Peace Camp", since it had
never performed a thorough revision of the Zionist "narrative" and
did not internalize the fact that there is a Palestinian "narrative"
too. The only remaining explanation was that the Palestinians had
deceived the Israeli Peace Camp, that they had never intended to
make peace and that their true purpose is to throw the Jews into the
sea, as the Zionist right has always claimed.

As a result, the dividing line
between the Zionist "right" and "left" disappeared. The leaders of
the Labor Party joined the Sharon Government and became his most
effective apologists (Shimon Peres) and even the formal leftist
opposition (Yossi Sarid) took part. This again proves that the
Zionist narrative is the decisive factor unifying all facets of the
political system in Israel, making the distinctions between Rehavam
Zeevi and Avraham Burg, Yitzhak Levi and Yossi Sarid insignificant.

There is a notable decline in
the Palestinian willingness to reopen a dialogue with the Israeli
peace forces, a consequence of the utter disappointment from the
"leftist government" which had inspired so much hope after the
Netanyahu years, as well as a consequence of the fact that apart
from the small radical peace groups no Israeli outrage at the brutal
reactions of the occupation forces has been heard. The tendency to
tighten ranks, typical to any nation in a war of liberation, makes
it possible for the extreme nationalistic and religious forces on
the Palestinian side to veto any attempt at Israeli-Palestinian
cooperation.

A New Peace Camp

The breakdown of the old peace
camp necessitates the creation of a new Israeli peace camp that will
be real, up-to-date, effective and strong, that can influence the
Israeli public and bring about a complete re-evaluation of the old
axioms in order to effect a change in the Israeli political system.

To do so, the new peace camp
must lead public opinion to a brave reassessment of the national
"narrative" and rid it of false myths. It must strive to unite the
historical versions of both people into a single "narrative", free
from historical deceptions, which will be acceptable to both sides.

While doing this it must also
educate the Israeli public that along with all the beautiful and
positive aspects of the Zionist enterprise, a terrible injustice was
done to the Palestinian people. This injustice, which peaked during
the "Naqba", obliges us to assume responsibility and correct as much
of it as is possible.

With a new understanding of
the past and the present, the new peace camp must formulate a peace
plan based on the following principles:

An independent and free
Palestinian State will be established alongside Israel.

The Green Line will be the
border between the two States. If agreed between the two sides,
limited territorial exchanges may be possible.

The Israeli settlements will
be evacuated from the territory of the Palestinian State.

The border between the two
States will be open to the movement of people and goods, subject to
arrangements made by mutual agreement.

Jerusalem will be the
capital of both States – West Jerusalem the capital of Israel and
East Jerusalem capital of Palestine. The State of Palestine will
have complete sovereignty in East Jerusalem, including the Haram
al-Sharif (the Temple Mount). The State of Israel will have complete
sovereignty in West Jerusalem, including the Western Wall and the
Jewish Quarter. Both States will reach agreement on the unity of the
city on the physical, municipal level.

Israel will recognize, in
principle, the Palestinian Right of Return as an inalienable human
right. The practical solution to the problem will come about by
agreement based on just, fair and practical considerations and will
include return to the territory of the State of Palestine, return to
the State of Israel and compensation.

The water resources will be
controlled jointly and allocated by agreement, equally and fairly.

A security agreement between
the two States will ensure the security of both and take into
consideration the specific security needs of Israel as well as of
Palestine.

Israel and Palestine will
cooperate with other States in the region, to establish a Middle
Eastern community, modeled on the European Union.

The signing of a Peace
agreement and its honest implementation in good faith will lead to a
historical reconciliation between the two nations, based on
equality, cooperation and mutual respect.

Submitted by Gush Shalom as a
draft for public debate. If you generally agree with the spirit of
this document – please send comments and remarks. Gush Shalom –
info@gush-shalom.org
P.O.Box 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033.
Hebrew and English versions can be downloaded from
www.gush-shalom.org
. Please help us to finance this campaign by check to Gush shalom.